Grading Equity

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Tisch lecture outlines a new "report card" on education

Richard Rothstein agrees with No Child Left Behind supporters on at
least one point: Holding schools accountable for improving children's
reading and writing skills will, in fact, eventually lead to
improvement in those skills. The problem, as Rothstein outlined it on
Monday evening, January 30th during the first of a three-part Teachers
College lecture series known as the Tisch Lectures, is that only those
skills will improve-'"to the detriment of others that are equally
important.

"What gets measured, gets done," said Rothstein,
Tisch Visiting Professor at TC and research associate at the Economic
Policy Institute, in a talk he titled Equity in What? Defining the
Goals of American Education for which We Seek Equity. "The current
accountability system makes American education more inequitable in
other areas, because the places that are weakest in basic skills are
most likely to reduce effort in other subjects to increase drill in
math and reading."

For the past year and a half, Rothstein and
two graduate assistants, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder, have been
working to create a new "report card" that will assess the nation's
progress in providing equal educational opportunities across a much
broader range of skills. The list, unveiled at the first Tisch lecture,
includes basic academic skills; critical thinking; social skills and
work ethic; citizenship; physical health; emotional health; the arts
and literature; and vocational education. The categories were neither
arbitrarily chosen, nor unprecedented in their breadth; in fact, as
Rothstein demonstrated, they closely resemble educational goals put
forth at various moments in American history by a list of authors that
includes George Washington, John Adams (in the Massachusetts state
constitution), Thomas Jefferson, Robert Dale Owen, Horace Mann, the
National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers,
Milton Friedman, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Supreme Courts of West
Virginia and New Jersey, and--as recently as 1991--the U.S. Department
of Education.

"Holding schools accountable only for math and
reading is an extreme position," Rothstein said. "NCLB is an historical
anomaly."

To bring that point home, Rothstein then presented
results from a survey in which representative samples of state
legislators, school board members and the national adult population
were asked to rank, in order of importance, the eight educational goals
that will form the basis of the TC report card. He compared these to
the ranking the Teachers College Report Card would set, as well as to a
poll taken from the lecture's audience members earlier in the evening.
Overall, the rankings were strikingly similar and, in all three
instances, respondents ranked categories such as critical thinking,
social skills and citizenship as very important.

Beyond NCLB's
impact on students, Rothstein also argued that the legislation has been
a negative for teachers. He shared with the audience a letter he had
recently received from a TC alumna, Jacquelyn Duran, who had taught at
a low-performing school in Los Angeles.

"The pressure became
so intense that we had to show how every single lesson we taught
connected to a standard that was going to be tested," Duran had
written. "This meant that art, music and even science and social
studies were hardly ever taught...This was a huge part of why I left
the profession."

In the next lecture in the series, in March
6, Rothstein will present a range of more specific indicators within
each of the report card's eight categories.

The report card's
ultimate goal, Rothstein said, is to spark debate about educational
priorities and prod political and educational leaders to hold schools
accountable for a broader range of skill development.

"Accountability is a favorite mantra of the right wing," he said, "and I agree with it."